North Korea has confirmed its first COVID-19 death, and says hundreds of thousands of people have “fever”, in the first indication of the scale of the outbreak in its largely unvaccinated population.
The nuclear-armed country announced on Thursday its first coronavirus outbreak since the pandemic began, moving into lockdown after it said people in the capital, Pyongyang, tested positive for the Omicron variant.
“A fever whose cause couldn’t be identified explosively spread nationwide from late April,” the official Korean Central News Agency said on Friday.
“Six persons died (one of them tested positive for the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron),” it added.
About 350,000 people have shown signs of “fever”, while 187,800 people are being treated in isolation, according to KCNA.
Experts worry North Korea’s health system will be unable to cope with spread of COVID in an unvaccinated population, they also believe the virus has been present in the country for some time, the authorities only announced the first cases on Thursday.
North Korea rejected offers from the international community to supply millions of AstraZeneca and Chinese-made jabs last year. Instead, it claimed it had controlled Covid by sealing its borders early in January 2020.
Many North Koreans are also in poor health as a result of food shortages and malnutrition, making it more difficult for their immune systems to fight the disease.
A 2019 study ranked North Korea 193 out of 195 countries in its capability to cope with a healthcare crisis.
Source:Aljazeera and CNN
Wow! They must act fast to stop the virus from spreading.
ReplyDeleteThis is serious.
ReplyDelete